A Minute With Hopie Stockman Hill
Hi! This is a newsletter about artists I like.
I began acquiring art through some friends who worked in galleries. I started small, working on a limited budget for stuff I could afford. As time passed, my collection grew, and it was exciting to watch many of the artists I'd collected go on to bigger shows and critical acclaim. My goal with this newsletter is to make a digestible resource for anyone interested in artists making excellent (and still affordable!) work whom you haven't heard about... yet.
I’ve been following Hopi’s work from being a fan of her company that she runs with her sister, Block Shop Textiles, and noticed her showing some work of her own on IG. I reached out a couple months ago and didn’t know she was gearing up for a show which is up now in New York at Charles Moffett. Good timing too because the show is getting praise and deservedly so. Here ya go…
How long have you been working on this show at Charles Moffett ?
HHS: I started the show when I was pregnant and I now have a one-year-old, so it’s been over 1.5 years. The paintings follow the arc of bringing a new life into the world and I’m quite attached to them for that reason. They were my companions keeping me company through a period of intense change.
Can you chat about the work and the show?
HHS: For this show I made 13 still life paintings that I think of as emotional landscapes, full of personal narrative. My paintings are rooted in the 17th C Dutch still life tradition but pull from influences ranging from the writing of Edith Wharton to the films of Joanna Hogg; women artists adept at using interior space to reflect the psyche. Also life in LA, surrealist food photography on the internet, my mom’s zeal for the natural world — things that are embedded into my consciousness. I’m drawn to the mystery inherent in the still life tradition and use of suggestive or symbolic objects to tell a story.
Everything I paint comes from LA, which feels like the land of natural (and imported) opulence, and the specificity of the species of flowers and fruits that I paint reflects that abundance. Combined with objects of my personal history, I use art historic tropes, taken magpie-style from my favorite painters, to create a palimpsest for my own present tense life.
The paintings in the show begin with loneliness / divorce and end with the exuberant joy of the birth of my son. They depict the ceremony, celebration, and honoring of the small, typically unseen moments in struggling to get pregnant or find partnership.
I’m a parent myself and noticed you are as well, how do you balance being an artist and parent? I imagine having solitude in a studio is quite the opposite of raising kiddos.
HHS: I’m the creative director of my textile business Block Shop on top of painting and raising our baby with my husband, so unfortunately for my spontaneity-loving past self, my time in the studio (and daily life for that matter) is all about efficiency. When I’m in the studio, I have to hide my phone away and crank. In addition to what I have going in my studio, I sometimes have a small painting going at home that I’ll work on before my baby wakes up and after he goes to sleep.
I recently picked up Anne Truitt’s Daybook, about her experience as an artist & parent, and it’s been a salve to read. I love that she made it a priority to have dinner on a set table with candles each night for her three kids (as a single mom no less!), even if it stressed her out to take the extra time for these domestic rituals. So I try my best not to tromp around like a task-master zombie once I’m home, and relish the pockets of lying-around-on-the-floor time.
Working with your sister where you run Block Shop Textiles, are there aspects of that business that help you with your art practice?
HHS: Block Shop is a highly collaborative creative project with a very democratic design process, whereas my painting process is deeply inward. The two modes of thinking and problem solving (group vs. solitary) provide a nice equilibrium. Both practices involve repetitive mark making which is therapeutic and meditative whether it’s applied to textiles or a canvas.
We like a studio shot! Would you be cool with sharping a couple images of your current studio?
HHS: Attached!
Did you have an ah-ha moment that made you want to be an artist ?
HHS: I’ve had other careers, but I’ve always just made art my whole life. So I relate to the Anne Truitt quote “I never decided at all to be an artist; being an artist seems to have happened to me.”
Who should we have on next?
HHS: I adore the introspective watercolors by Brooklyn and Cape Cod-based writer & painter Julia Felsenthal.
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